The Firefox 3 beta 3 has managed to impress me with sheer stupidity. Gushing praise to follow, though.

So I’m reading the new features and bugs and shit, because the whole point here is to see the new hotness. I’m damn sure not going to be using FF3 seriously until Mouse Gestures is updated to support it. That’s seriously a dealbreaker. Anyhow, I see this: “The new Location Bar, Add Bookmark dialog, and Download Manager information popup behave inconsistently with Window-Eyes. JAWS 8.0 or better is recommended for this beta. (bug 393398)” My question is this: do these people have any idea at all how much a screen reader fucking costs? If their solution is to tell people to buy a $900 program, they better come up with a different solution, and fucking fast. (Of course, this is a beta, so this falls under the heading of “this will probably be fixed by the time it’s released.”) Also, the new bookmark dialogue is a bit cumbersome in regards to folders, though the system seems to be tooled more toward using tags rather than manually arranging shit into folders. Still, I make heavy use of “Open folder in tabs” so this irks me.

(Incidentally, while writing this, a bit about Window-Eyes came up in NHB’s automation. The same bit, in fact, that made me start listening to NHB in the first place.)

Now, that said, Firefox 3 is fast. Stupid fast. And the commands to increase and decrease text size have been replaced with full page zoom, like they have in Opera. Fucking win. I have been waiting for this feature for so long, it’s not even funny. Though adding commands to zoom by 100% increments as well would be nice. But either way, I’m stoked that I’ll be able to finally get rid of the “zoom images in” bookmarklet, an ugly hack at best. And I’ve seen, at long last, the Acid2 test rendered correctly. (Which means nothing more than “FF3 can render this one page correctly,” but it’s marginally indicative of standards compliance, and it’s still pretty cool regardless.)

And now off to uninstall. Gonna be nice when this thing is released, though.